The company I used to work for (not the show itself, but the much smaller company that technically employed me) has hired me for the week to clean out their old offices, which were basically unused by more than one person for over two years.

They’re selling much of the old furniture to the incoming tenants, but they’ve decided not to store any of the remnants, so they’re giving away what they couldn’t convince the new kids to take.

I scored a very nice lamp, which will now bring light to my attempts to read on the couch, and a great overstuffed chair that conveniently matches the color of the couch.

There’s only one minor issue: The chair has been sat upon by two dogs in the fairly recent past, a pug belonging to my former employers and a husky/Aussie shephard mix belonging to another employee.

This was slightly concerning, since I know Chaplin doesn’t get along very well with other animals (this is a large part of why I have him in the first place: while he’s a sweet kitty on his own, he didn’t get along with his previous owner’s other pets).

After I dragged the chair into my apartment this evening, Chaplin flipped a bit, sniffing and scratching and scratching and sniffing at it, and seemingly generally concerned.

At least he was until he decided to bury himself in the chair, working his own little groove into the seat. It’ll be covered in cat hair in no time.

And that’s when I’ll know that the chair is definitely mine, since the defining characteristic of about 90% of what I own is that it’s covered in cat hair.

I got a call from the folks at Apple about my computer today.

The bad news is, because I have a matte screen on my MacBook Pro and will not even consider getting a glossy screen, they won’t have a part in until Feb 7th, and won’t have my computer back to me until Feb. 11-12.

The good news is, to compensate me for my inconvenience, they offered me two options.

1. Ship me a brand new computer with the exact same specs for the same amount I would have paid for the repair, and have it arrive Friday (Feb 1) or Monday (Feb 4), or

2. Cut the price of the repair in half, and get it back the 11th-12th.

I have to admit, option #1 was thoroughly tempting, especially because after a week of using the temp MacBook, I’m more certain than ever that I made the right decision to spring for the Pro. The reflections on the glossy screen drive me batshit.

But after calling the computer rental place to see how much it would cost to extend the rental and running some numbers with sales tax, I realized that waiting was going to save me almost $600 to just wait for the repair.

So, the bad news is, I have to put up with the tiny, glossy, pain in the ass rental for a while longer, but the good news is, I save six hundred bucks.

At this point, the option that saves me $600 wins, even if it involves fire ants. Which, thankfully, this does not.

I saw this in a comment thread on Fark today, and I couldn’t stop laughing for about five minutes afterwards.

I don’t know why I found this so goddamn funny, but it still makes me snicker when I look at it.

It hath wrought the G.I. Joe movie.

He-Man and She-ra, please call your agents.

I was driving to meet a friend for brunch yesterday and saw a very unusual and rather breathtaking sight: The mountains behind Los Angeles, covered in snow, clear as a bell.

Here’s an awesome picture of, basically, what I saw, (with a hat tip to LAist for pointing it out). Looks like that was taken a little later in the afternoon when some of the smog and clouds had started to return.

Given that this was the view of downtown from Mt. Hollywood just a couple weeks ago, (you’ll note that you can’t actually, you know, see downtown) I’d call yesterday’s weather a substantial improvement.

I will say, as ugly and dopey as this city can be, when the smog clears up, it’s really, really gorgeous here.

An aside huzzah: I now have a replacement replacement computer. Let’s see if this one works for more than a day.

I was catching up with Fark links for the last day when I came across a fascinating story about a man with no legs who surreptitiously took pictures of everyone who stared at him as he wheeled around the world on his skateboard.

Kevin Connoly’s site is a little flash-heavy, but it has some of the best pictures from his exhibition. It’s definitely worth a look, and you can see what he means about getting the same look all over the world.

His site also leads to a story with a really interesting video about the project and his life in general.

I don’t have much more to add beyond that at the moment, but I was so captivated by this guy’s story and project that I felt I ought to share.

…Where there are no electronic things I can break or have crap out on me.

The fucking hard drive on the laptop I rented while mine’s getting fixed up and died on me when I got back from work.

I ran disk utility off my Leopard install disk (a way you can sometimes fix problems with a pesky drive), and it was like the laptop’s drive wasn’t even there.

If, somehow, the shop I rented from decides this is my fault, I’m out a $1500 deposit on top of everything else. It’s a low level possibility, but the way my tech karma’s been fucking with me lately, I wouldn’t be surprised.

I’m starting to think I should have just sucked it up and bought a new computer. At least then, among other things, I wouldn’t be typing this on my crackberry.

I had put my MacBook Pro on that counter before, a thousand times before. I had no reason to think last night was any different.

No reason until it came tumbling down, open, about 10pm last night. And that’s when today’s nightmare began.

I thought it was fine at first: Everything was working properly, no readily visible damage, at least not in the piss-poor lighting of my apartment.

I always work with my laptop on my lap, so the first, “Oh fuck” didn’t cross my mind until I put the laptop on the coffee table so I could get up and start doing my foot stretches. I noticed it wasn’t quite sitting level.

Okay, that’s not too bad, I thought. Then I tried to eject the DVD I’d been watching, and it bonked against the case in a futile fashion. Crap, that’s bad.

I decided to call and get some estimates in the morning. Taking it in to a reseller (who I thought might get me a better price than Apple directly, since Apple’s warranty doesn’t cover butterfingers), I noticed that when I closed it, the lid was obviously bent at a weird curve.

That was when I knew this was going to be REALLY expensive.

On any laptop, if you seriously damage something related to the casing around the screen, nine times out of ten you have to replace the whole screen, even if you’ve been lucky enough not to have the screen itself break on you.

Since the screen is one of the single most expensive parts of any laptop, and particularly expensive-ass MBP’s, this was going to cost me.

The reseller gave me an estimate in the mid $1300′s, but advised I go to the Apple store since they’d have to send it in to Apple for a repair that serious anyway, and perhaps I could throw myself upon their mercy and get something at least a little cheaper.

And a little cheaper it was: If I wanted to have all the damage repaired, rather than just the more egregiously fucked bottom part of the case (and the full repair is necessary to keep the warranty in force), it was $1240.

The good news is, the $1240 figure covers ANYTHING else they find wrong with it. If I fucked up the disk drive too, then that’s covered. If they have to just send me a whole new computer, it will still be $1240.

I would also be without my computer for anywhere from 5-10 business days, necessitating renting a temporary computer, since the only work I have right now is freelance tech consulting, for which you need a computer.

The only place they could find that would rent to individuals (as opposed to buisnesses) gave the fairly reasonable-for-these-things rate of $170 for two weeks.

So immediately, I would be out $1460. Considering the computer itself cost $2800, this was a fairly substantial sum. It is also, I’d like to note, more than my incredibly steep rent for one month.

And in case you’re thinking it, nope, renter’s insurance won’t cover it since it was a very obvious drop. If it’d been stolen or lost in a fire, maybe. Not dropped.

I briefly considered just bagging it and getting a new computer for the same money, but the problem is that I didn’t get the cheaper MacBook for a reason: I do audio recording which strongly benefits from more advanced ports (firewire 800 vs. 400), as well as web design and photo stuff that really needs the extra boost of the bigger screen and better graphics card.

Plus, the glossy screen drives me batshit to absolutely no end. I’d been helping a friend set up her new MacBook and had been ever more convinced I’d done the right thing springing for the Pro.

I probably could have sold the busted Pro for parts, but I had no idea if it’d bring in enough money (around $1000-1200) to pay for the difference between the cost to fix it and a new Pro. Without that knowledge, I was kind of up a creek.

So I sucked it up and decided to get it fixed. I’m now typing on the rented MacBook (which, by the way, is good for basic stuff but is heavily reaffirming my decision to just get the damn Pro fixed).

Now I will admit, I’m EXTREMELY fortunate that I have some deep-freeze funding that I’m being allowed to access (which I normally would not have access to, but the parental units who control it deemed this a worthy exception) to pay for this debacle.

I’d be super-duper-mega-extra fucked without that, and I’m REALLY not happy I had to access that in the first place, especially since this was due to my own carelessness.

Lord knows when the busted computer comes back from the shop, I’ll be velcroing the fucker to my desk/coffee table any time it’s not on my lap.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is about as dumb as you’d think. parts of it are dumber, parts of it are not as dumb. Overall…about as dumb.

I’m not quite at the point of demanding the filmmakers pay me for the 2 hours I spent watching it, but yet I still think I’d like those two hours back.

I strolled out to the mailbox today to retrieve my Netflix movies, the better to facilitate keeping my broke ass at home.

I was expecting two movies, but when I opened up the mailbox, I saw three. Huh, I thought, they must have mailed me an extra copy of the Futurama movie, which I mailed back this morning.

Not so. I opened all three movies, found the two that I was expecting…and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.

I had no desire to see it, so I’d never even put it in my queue. I thought maybe it was for one of my neighbors, but no, addressed to me, sent from the same shipping center as my other movies.

I mean, perhaps the fact that one of my other movies arriving today was lesbian cult hit The Incredibly True Adventures of 2 Girls in Love (we are not a people who are economical with our titles) might have tipped Netflix off to the fact that I’m a gay lesbian, and made them suggest this as a related movie.

Generally, however, suggestions of related movies are not mailed to you as an extra film, particularly when you have not actually requested them.

I suppose, since I really have nothing better to do, I might as well watch it, if only to see how bad it is: As bad as you’d think, not as bad as you’d think, or even worse than you’d think.

I’ll post here probably tomorrow with the results of this experiment.

Post title courtesy the greatest non sequitur ever to appear on Law & Order (fast forward to about 1:50 of that video for the hilarious part of the scene).